DVCPRO 1080i50

[Walter Biscardi]

[Sergio Deustua] “Some friend told me that I must not work at all with interlaced material, that that will only give me more troubles and ugly images.”

False.

[Sergio Deustua] “What kind of problems will I find if I finally go to the 1080i50?
Does the 1080i50 coming from Varicam can be specially a bad choice?”

No problems at all if your original source material is 1080i/50 (really 1080i/25 as in 25 frames per second).

The Varicam cannot shoot 1080 so your material would have to be 720/25. You can convert this cleanly to 1080i/50 via the AJA Kona 3 board.

[Sergio Deustua] “Maybe some of you have confronted with this situation before.”

I have edited three documentary episodes in 1080i/50 and ran into zero issues. It’s just another format as far as we’re concerned.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Sergio Deustua]

Thanks Walter, is good to hear that.

[walter biscardi] “The Varicam cannot shoot 1080 so your material would have to be 720/25.”

I´m trying hard to capture 720p25 material shooted in Varicam at 25fps using the 1200 deck, throug Blacmagic Multibridge into FCP 6.0.2, but with no resoults at all. A couple of guys in the forums said that this is posible…

What Im doing is:

Option 1: Deck set to 25 HD frequency, SDI conection, “Blackmagic HDTV 720 p 25 Varicam” easy set up in FCP. Doesn´t work.

Option 2: Deck set to 59/94 frequency, PB format AUTO, SDI conection, “Blackmagic HDTV 720 p 25 Varicam” easy set up in FCP. Doesn´t work.

What am I missing?, Is it really posible to capture 720p25 material from Varicam?

Thanks again.

[Del Chapple]

Make sure your deck Freq is 50/25. the capture card will not lock to the deck even if the Freq is off a little. If you can validate whats actually coming out of the deck via scope. Progressive is always better than interlace IMHO, its a trade off 720 has more vertical rez and 1080 has more horizantal rez.

del

you cant hear my inner voice scream… can you..?

[Carsten Orlt]

Sergio
You’re quite correct, it is impossible to capture 720p25 Varicam material into FCP. And you can’t use the Kona (or any other card for that matter) to convert it, because neither the 1200 nor the 1400 Panasonic vtr play 720p25 Varicam material other then straight away converting it to 1080i25. There is some fancy tricky ‘jumping backwards through the hoop’ way of getting 720p25 through firewire, but its not worth the effort if your delivery is for television. Almost all broadcaster around the world want to have a 1080i master these days so you have to convert it to this standard anyway at some point.

Your friends concern were probably in regard to footage shot in interlace format. But your not having this problem 🙂 All that is happening is that your 720p25 is converted to 1080psf25. PSF stands for ‘progressive segmented frame’. It means that a progressive frame is just split into 2 fields for recording/transmission purposes. There is a 1080p standard BUT no Broadcaster (that I know off) is using it, because the amount of data would be to big to handle for transmission. So there is only 1080i (no easy preset in FCP/Aja for 1080p!).
I’m just starting my first 1080i25 project because of the exact same reason as you because we’re shooting mainly on Varicam. So far no problem and it shouldn’t have any!
The only thing that could have some effect theoretically is anything with a speed change. Because in a 1080i seq FCP does field rendering. But I have tried a few different speed changes and can’t see any problems.

That was the long answer 🙂
The short one: No problem at all and you’re straight away working in your mastering format and therefor can be assured if it works in FCP it’ll be fine on tape because you’ll not convert it again.
Carsten

Carsten

[Walter Biscardi]

[Sergio Deustua] ”
What am I missing?, Is it really posible to capture 720p25 material from Varicam?”

Yes, this does work with our AJA Boards. We did this in our independent film.

What I had to do was create my own Capture Preset with 720 / 25 as there was not a standard one. But it came in perfectly fine.

The deck must be properly set up to the 25 frequency or it won’t work. You must make sure there is not a tape in the machine and that you perform a power cycle when you change the deck frequency.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow!

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[Carsten Orlt]

that is interesting. are you sure walter that you didn’t crossconvert the output from the 1200 from 1080 back to 720 via the Kona?

[Carsten Orlt]

in 25HD mode the 1200 produces a 1080i25 signal NOT 720!

[Walter Biscardi]

[Carsten Orlt] “that is interesting. are you sure walter that you didn’t crossconvert the output from the 1200 from 1080 back to 720 via the Kona?”

Nope, the entire movie was shot in 720/24 and 720/25 and ingested that way 2 years ago. At the time we used only the Kona 2 which does not perform cross conversion.

The 1200A does play out 720/25 in our experience. We had that deck for about 2 1/2 years before we switched to 1400’s.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow!

Read my Blog!

[Carsten Orlt]

have to do some more research 🙂
cheers

[Carsten Orlt]

I don’t have a blackmagic card, but I have the ioHD
I do not have a 1200 in house, but hire it when needed.
So the following is my educated guess, and you need to verify it with your equipment!!!

You can’t capture 720p25 with the blackmagic hardware because the BM hardware can’t drop frames from the Varicam stream on the fly. So it can only capture the full 720p60. You can’t convert this via the Final Cut frame converter function, because it only accepts 59.94. But you can only shoot 720p25 with the Varicam when you set the camera to 60Hz NOT 59.94.

Now if you have the Aja hardware you can theoretically (Walter&Gary said this, but I can’t test it until I have the VTR here) capture the 25 Fps when you use the 720p60 Varicam input of a Kona or ioHD. This will drop the duplicated frames and capture only the 25 active frames. Because this only works via the 60Hz setting of the Kona/ioHD my guess is that it will cause problems with the timecode if you are working in the 50Hz world (Pal countries). And I don’t know what happens if you drop this captured clip into a 720p50 sequence?

You can’t capture 720p25 via firewire because FCP only accepts DVCProHD at 59.94 over firewire, But to shoot 25p the Varicam has to be set to 60 Hz.

But if you, as you said, use the conversion function of the 1200 and set it to the 25HD mode the VTR will convert the 25 Fps straight into the 50Hz world. But in this mode it only outputs 1080psf25, NOT 720p. Not sure why Panasonic did it this way, but they did (same for the 1400 by the way).

These are basically your options and you have to decide which is the best way to go.

I certainly have another look at the possibility to capture via the 720p60 Varicam setting in my ioHD to see what I can get. Basically I’m happy to use the 1080i25 format because it is my final mastering format, but because 720 is so much smaller and easier to handle for the compi I still like to check if it is workable…

Hope that helps
carsten